Travels through German-Jewish History
Click here for a synopsis of the virtual exhibitions awaiting you in the Rafael Roth Learning Center. The stories embrace a multiplicity of exceptional documents, films, fotos and audios. You can read, listen and watch an extract here and experience them on site.
Albert Einstein
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Bertha Pappenheim
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Christian Images of Jews
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Daniel Libeskind
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Eastern European Jews in Germany
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Exile in Shanghai
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Heinrich Heine
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Jews in Breisach
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Liberation
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Longing for Zion
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Many myths and legends have grown up around Albert Einstein. He was one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century, an international media star and the most famous Jew of his time. In his public and private life he was a man with many passions and idiosyncrasies. 
Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936) founded the Jewish Women’s League (Jüdischer Frauenbund). Throughout her life she campaigned for political rights and educational opportunities for Jewish women and girls. She was also involved in the struggle against prostitution and trafficking in girls. 
Christian images of Jews have been marked by false ideas, prejudices and condemnation since the Middle Ages. Many of these stereotypes survived into the modern era. 
Daniel Libeskind (b. 1946) is one of the most outstanding architects of our age. With his remarkable design for the Jewish Museum, he created a new type of communicative architecture. This and his other international projects attest to his ability to convey complex messages on history and the future through architecture. 
Between 1880 and 1924 Jews emigrated to Germany from Eastern Europe to escape poverty and persecution in their home countries. Although they met with hostility and discrimination, many were able to create a new life for themselves. Representing the different fates of migrants are the lives of Chaim Weizmann, Cecylie and Heinrich Bien, Alexander Granach, Joseph Budko, the Friedmann and Goldstein families, and the Mandelbaum family. 
After the 1938 November Pogrom, Shanghai became one of the most important sanctuaries for Jewish emigrants. In the period up to 1941, some 20,000 refugees, most of them German Jews, made their way to the infamous city on the East China Sea. 
Heinrich Heine was one of the most important thinkers and poets of his age. He described himself as a “political writer in every sense,” a "drummer boy" in the struggle for human emancipation. His work polarized audiences and was heavily censored, particularly in Prussia. Heine emigrated to Paris following the outbreak of the French July Revolution. 
Louis Dreyfuss (1900–1993), a gymnast, actor and carnival MC, was a popular celebrity in Breisach, Baden. In 1933 he became the first Jew from his home city to leave Germany. He survived the war hiding in France and eventually returned to Breisach in 1964. 
In April 1945, the British Army liberated tens of thousands of prisoners from the Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp. The survivors included Celia Landau and the sisters Anita and Renate Lasker. Before leaving Germany,
they lived in the Jewish Displaced Persons’ Camp, which was set up close to the former concentration camp. 
The desire to return to the land of Israel is as old as Jewish exile, and it is expressed in a wide variety of Jewish festivals, prayers and traditions. Many Jews realized their dream of traveling to the Holy Land and recorded their impressions in travel reports and images. 